Emerging Concepts in Non-volatile Memory Technologies - Era of Resistance Switching Memories

The field of embedded electronic systems is still emerging, e.g. in attractive products from widespreaded industry as well as in corresponding academic and industrial research activities. Here, multipurpose adaptivity and reliability features are playing more and more central roles, especially while scaling silicon technologies down according to Moore´s goals. On the other side reconfigurable computing technologies are getting more and more awareness by leading processor and mainframe companies, due to increasing energy and cost constraints. These technologies are very advanced in the meanwhile, e.g. also from the high-level tooling point of view. Thus, an ldquoall-win-symbiosisrdquo of future silicon-based processor technologies and reconfigurable circuit/architectures is a must from my point of view. In addition, dynamic and partial reconfiguration found its way from academic labs to industry research and development groups, including the investigation for system integration of real-world applications. The exploitation of dynamic and partial reconfiguration in embedded electronic systems provides a high adaptivity in different kind of applications and situations. Reliability, failure-redundancy and run-time adaptivity by usage of real-time hardware reconfiguration are important aspects for actual and future systems. In order to exploit such kind of adaptive chips sufficiently by handling complexity and execution/application dynamics during runtime efficiently, recent research initiatives like organic computing are giving promising perspectives by learning from mechanisms and behaviours in nature, e.g. in optimizing on-demand chip adaptivity by realizing selected organic functionalities.